


Battue

by grayglube



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon Divergent, Character Death, F/M, Rape/Non-con Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-21
Updated: 2016-07-04
Packaged: 2018-04-07 22:46:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 6
Words: 21,648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4280763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grayglube/pseuds/grayglube
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Battue:<br/>1. a hunt where the game is driven into the arms of the hunters<br/>2. the game slaughtered<br/>3. any kind of mass slaughter of the unresisting</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part 1

**Author's Note:**

> Canon divergent, a mix of book and show elements  
> Sorta dark

_I dreamt of a maid at a feast with purple serpents in her hair, venom dripping from their fangs. And later I dreamt that maid again, slaying a savage giant in a castle built of snow._

-The Ghost of Highheart

 

***               *               ***

 

She wonders who has slept in her bed, who has lain in it, been had in it. She sits at the open window, she won’t sleep in the filth of others. Not here, not in what was once her home. She thinks of her bed, who sleeps in it now. The cold is different than the one in the Eyrie. Like dry bones. She was safer stupid, she knows. It was true with Joffery. But, Ramsay is not a boy, the Boltons are not lions, they have no gold. They have the skins of Starks hidden away amongst their treasures.

 

There are lessons she remembers, words that were history, the history of the North, her history. The Greystarks were killed off because they joined the Boltons. When the Andals came the Boltons backed the Starks, and they shared the North because otherwise there would be no North. Belthasar Bolton had a pavilion made of one hundred human hides. She wonders if the bastard learned the same stories, she wonders what the books will say of him, what his epitaph with be, all the Boltons she can remember are known for their cruelty, for their betrayal, for killing Starks.

 

They’ve smashed the heads off the stone direwolves and defaced the murals, the one over the gatehouse, the plain and ancient Kings of Winter, is gone. She’d seen it every day she’d ever been in Winterfell, _is this still Winterfell_ she wonders, her home, she’s not sure, she wonders if it’s because she’s been gone from the North for so long or if because truly, and finally, her home is gone. She wonders if it was taken by Boltons, or if by carelessness, lost by Starks.

 

***               *               ***

 

She’s doing her duty. Her mother had also done her duty, _duty_. Petyr talked of how he might have been her father but her mother was given to a Stark instead. A Stark who died and then she was given to another. _Given_ to her father. Her mother had sworn vows without ever having seen her father’s face, she gave away her maidenhead to a boy who had to become a man because he was suddenly a lord.

 

Sansa thinks of what the songs will say of her, the northern maid they tried to give to abominations born of incest and stunted monsters of men, cripples, buggerers, weaklings, and bastards.

 

Her mother promised her songs, promised her that her father would find a maester who could teach her to master the high harp. She'd learned on her own while Arya fumbled on her toes, chased cats, water danced and then disappeared, Sansa wonders, not for the first time where her sister is, Arya Underfoot. Lady Breanne of Tarth had said alive, and mayhap she is. Or mayhap she’s dead, as dead and red as their mother and brothers.

 

Stannis might make her marry another northern lord. If he wins. Stannis might make her Wardeness of the North. Women have ruled before. But she would be the first woman to hold Winterfell. She is not a Mormont of Bear Island or a Queen of Mountain and Vale, no Storm Queen. Women die too, they surrender so their children will live, they are given away. Stannis would never let her hold Winterfell. Winterfell, rubble now which every house with lordly sons still wants. If she dies they will kill each other to claim it.

 

The Starks have wolf blood, stronger in some than others. It was strong in Arya and Bran and Jon. Robb tried, he tried and died. Rickon is, _was_ , just a little boy but Sansa remembers his temper. She is trying too, to find and feel what they felt, but she knows she is too much like her mother. Too much the pretty red Tully maid. _Family_ comes first in their words, she has no family left, _Duty_ and _Honor_ , they are all she has left. That, and the promise of Winter. She wonders if this is honorable, to be married to a man with the name the same as those who have burned Winterfell twice before. To the son of the man that killed her brother, her mother, who has betrayed them, and the North.

 

She tries to remember what her father had said. The lone wolf dies and the pack survives. She remembers her courtesies and smiles and easy emotions and they sniff at her, lick, nuzzle, lift leg to piss on her and she’s pack. She’ll eat and curl up close with them, maybe even whelp and live. But Lady’s shade is at the foot of her bed, down in the crypts next to her father’s empty tomb, in the godswood licking at her palm and she knows she’ll never really be anything but Stark.

 

Family first, her mother said that, but Honor lies behind Duty, without Duty done there is no Honor for any of them.

 

_“I take this man.”_

 

***                    *                    ***

 

_Petyr had said so many things, promised so much, given her so much hope._

 

**_Avenge them. Would I do that? Make him yours._ **

 

_Words._

 

_Words, and that’s all._

 

_She’s been a little fool, again. How much and how many should she distrust, and the words come to her, **all of them.** She looks at the casements, opens them, and something holds her, her grief, she is too much a coward to jump, she is too brave to let Bolton take her pride **and** her life so dully, so obviously, so easily forgotten, she is too much a fool to know things will not get better._

 

***                         *                    ***

 

At court they all try to grab at the bride, rip her skirts off as if they have the right, and the groom allows it, how weak a man is who let’s other men touch his bride. That doesn’t happen now, there are so few wedding guests and the men won’t touch the last Stark, they scowl as Ramsay leads her away. There is no retinue of high lords and ladies belling noisily outside their wedding chamber.

 

She hears them say, brave Sansa Stark, Ned’s brave girl, and then the bard, not more than a quickly found cantabank, sings _Brave Danny Flint_ and Sansa thinks about dying in hard, ugly ways as she follows meek and mute down from the halfpace.

 

The doom of being _owned_. The unrightness of it all, it hollows out her guts, not empty but a dropping out of her heart and of its beating. She tries to promise to some nameless god that she won’t cry out, wonders how many other girls have promised themselves the same on their wedding nights. She thinks of her mother, she thinks of Margaery, she thinks of the queen even. His mouth, she’d thought it was lucky to not be plump and pink and girlish but when it’s pressed on her naked back it feels no different. Joffery had been a cruel boy, but his mood was changeable, always, so easy for some to bring to heel. Ramsay is not a boy.

 

The heat from her furs is a prickly stale pinch, itching at her neck and back and she’s glad for it to be gone when he pulls it free after he’s pushed her to the bed. He’s yanking at her small clothes, jerking, and they dig into her sex, into her thighs and that’s a relief too, when they are gone and then the hot red flush of shame, pride of having been a maid for this long at least, the thing in the corner watching, obedient and mute and crying as if what has happened is not his fault. She’s going to kill him, and there is no ladylike voice pronouncing etiquette to rap at her fingers or correct her for being rude.

 

Her shoes are too tight, made too small. There’s the scratch of her skirts, ripped, ruined, the cool of the room, the heat and chafe of him, her lord husband, she wants to be brave, and cold, and steel but he is heavy and a man and rough weight on her back and kicking her feet apart and the pinch and incomprehensible push of him inside, it hurts and she cries out, wounded in a way they have not hurt her before, she thinks of the godswood, how pretty, how she tried to think and place the bastard of Dreadfort’s face to that of a hero or a prince or a lord and her in the place of all the ladies the bards sing of.

 

His mouth leaves spittle on her skin and she can’t wipe it away and the furs rub at her chin and cheeks and she just wants him off, it hurts and she is soiled, shamed, thinks it is enough, it’s done. She wants to weep that it's enough. Isn't it enough?

 

But his fingers pull at her braids and she thinks of Arya pulling her hair and blindly she’s slapping back, her hair, her hair being pulled, _she hates it, hates it hates it_ , she breathes, after he laughs, low, stills, presses her deeper to the bed, she stills, waits, corrects her unruliness, wonders if her pain will be less for it, it isn’t, he yanks and she screehes, crying out, scratching at him with desperate, weak hands, he’s jerking, stilling, pressing close and then the spurt of his seed and she goes still, so still, thrashes, _no_.

 

It’s all that’s left. No.

 

She will _not._

 

The Bastards of the North are called Snow. She thinks of how her mother looked at Jon, imagines how she would look at a son of hers who bore the name Bolton. The queen said she would never love Joffery but she would love the children he gave her, it was a lie. Sansa thinks of all the pain women have when they bring sons and daughters forth, the pain of what is done before that, to have a child become like Jofferey, love is a lie. So much effort for something that might die or turn rotten.

 

She will _not_. Her mother will not, her mother is dead, dead by a Bolton and a Frey. Roose and Walda, lord and lady of the Dreadfort, they watched her carefully, _I take this man_.

 

_Never_.

 

Roose’s eyes daring her to say no, Ramsay’s placid unmoving, gray and icy, and it doesn’t matter, she knew then, take him or not, will it or not, she’s his. She has nowhere else to go, not a single place.

 

She wonders if the room has no windows because they fear a bride leaping from them, she wonders if it is the same with all newlywed girls.

 

She shakes, sweating, full of rage. Red hair, he says, maid with summer in her hair, he smells it, inhales, says he’s always liked girls with red hair. Reek can’t remember all the words to the song he would like to hear. She sings, it’s a long night, she's swollen, hot and hurting.

 

He makes lurid cruel japes, her maidenhead broken red and bright on his body. Like a bloody sword, he says. Like Red-arm Bolton, she says. He doesn’t know his own house’s history, she has to trip over the words of a story that sounds silly out loud, no less lurid than his own, red armed from pulling out entrails. He smiles like knives and hums, satisfied, strips her.

 

He has her stand on display for the ruined thing that weeps, calls for wine and she drinks deeply, messily, it runs down her neck, between her breasts and he touches fingertips to her skin, "You will be in your cups soon, if you drink like that." He takes the cups from her and drains the rest. "I wouldn’t want you to fall asleep."

 

He stops to consider her, naked and shaking. "What do you think of my bride Reek?" 

 

"She's very pretty m'lord."

 

"All that time in the south has made her soft, come feel."

 

She sneers at the maimed hands her bridegroom takes in his own and forces upon her, her throat sticks and she cannot hide her hate, her red rage and hot shame.

 

She’d all but growled at the Maid of Tarth, spiteful and weak, like a child, but trusting more in the monster across the rough hewn table than the monstrous picture of a woman in mail. She never lit the candle in the tower. She did not pull her horse from the rank and file, ride hard, fast, for as long as she could, reach the wall and Jon and bend the knee to Stannis, scream for justice scream for the vengeance that her father deserved, _are you the right and true king? You’d let his heir be sold, let his name be destroyed. Robb rose because you did not, the North will not suffer coward kings._

 

The words of a plea and a petition she will never speak to Stannis, like the words of a song, it takes her from the bridal bed, for a while at least.

 

She is not steel, she’s a stone tomb, like Lyanna who was beautiful and Summer’s Queen and crowned with blue winter roses and stolen by a prince, lovely and purple eyed who played the harp and knew the songs, who fought like any of the long dead dragons, who raped Lyanna more times than anyone will ever knew and kept her in a tower and killed her.

 

Lyanna was beautiful and could ride horses and hunt and laughed loudly and was wild and strong and was stolen and raped and dead in a bed of blood and that beautiful prince was smashed inside his armor by a dead king and the rubies in his armor came undone and flowed down the river, her sister Arya had waded in and looked for them with the boy the hound gave back to his father in pieces thrown into a bag, like a slaughtered animal’s hanks. The butcher had thanked him before he’d known what it was.

 

Sansa the Songstress, her mouth lifts in the corner. She thinks of songs. It hurts badly. He has her sing while he moves to be inside of her, again.

 

“I think it’s time for you to retire Reek, it’s late and me and my bride have more to enjoy on our wedding night.”

 

“Yes m’lord.” She can hear his relief.

 

“You’re Sansa Bolton now.” He speaks into her hair. She weeps. Unseemly, a part of her says, she knows. Crying like a child over trifles, she’d had no pity for those small sad girls that surrounded her the night Stannis tried to burn everything, she did not weep with fear of what might be done to her if he had succeeded, but in the dark, no longer a maid, she weeps. A part of her speaks, deep down, spits and hisses and she wonders if she has the strength to strangle her bridegroom in his sleep, she holds her breath, listens to him breathe, even, unnatural, he moves and she flinches because he has hurt her, like a small animal snared she does not want to be touched, a part of her scoffs, how many girls are ever happy to no longer be maids. Not many, she knows this now. She thinks of Joffery, a stupid boy asking her to kiss his sword, Hearteater, an unsullied blade. She’s been sullied herself, horribly so and Ramsay makes her kiss him like he's a bloody sword.

 

***                    *                    ***

_There’s the song of the winter rose, daughter of Brandon the daughterless who bore Bael the wildling bard a son, in the crypts of Winterfell, the Stark that Brandon never thought he would see, the boy slayed his father beyond the wall and the Rose of Winterfell threw herself from a tower and was covered by the white flaughts of a near endless winter and Bael’s vengeful son died soon too, slain by his Bannerman who wore his skin as a cloak._

_In the crypts Brandon the Daughterless is not far from the front._

_The Boltons have always been enemies, for as long as they’ve kept time by means of the dead entombed within the crypts._

 

***                    *                    ***

 

Sometimes he is softer, more dangerous in subtle tones and sweet sinister words.

 

Stannis will come during the black of moon, she tells him, and he does later, much later. He asks if she’s a traitor in quiet tones, hand gentle on her throat and the other pushing up her skirts, she says she remembers how he almost won King’s Landing, and Ramsay wonders if she would have liked that, she says she would have died then if he had. She remembers fire, the sooty sky blacking out the stars, Stannis vowing to burn everything, she hadn’t cared if he burned the godswood so long as he burned the sept, her father’s blood spilled on those steps, she wanted it all to burn.

 

Her husband doesn’t hear and his fingers prod at her, they hurt and she shuts her eyes until he makes her open them again.

 

***                    *                    ***

 

She remembers Joffery’s gifts, jeweled things, slippers and hairnets, silks for dresses and lace for hems, bruises underneath all the pretty things he gave her to wear above. Full of rage, full of fear narrowing his eyes into a squint as if it would help him see something to prove she was mocking him. He would take her hand or offer an arm and she’d fight the revulsion trying to find its way to her face. She’d count her breaths, be still, the sort of still she’d seen under Winterfell.  

 

Roose Bolton had clenched his jaw instead, and it was not a squint he’d made in the courtyard as she bowed and greeted him by the title he does not deserve, it’d been as if his brow had dropped. Her smile was bare and then nothing at all, her face, placid, still, cool in the cold, stone, the visage of Sansa Stark, calm and silent. She _is_ mocking him.

 

She remembers Tyrion, drunk on summerwine, telling her of Cersei, telling her about Lannister assuredness, how the queen spoke of her _wet with love, she would have done anything for Joffery, until he cut off her father’s head and called it mercy._

 

The Warden of the North killed her brother, she knows, the North knows, and the Freys called it retribution for a slight, and the Lannisters called it well worth the price, and the Boltons called it their due, their vengeance after so many years of being pushed back by the Starks.

 

No one calls what they have done justice.

 

She is not a kind girl, she's wished shame and maiming, death by joust, unruly horse, single combat. She remembers watching a man die during her first tourney, and on Joffery’s name day the sound of a man’s skull bouncing off the ground, stuck in the stirrups of a running horse, she can’t remember his name, only that she hated him. There’s a report from the Wall she hears from Ramsay, her bastard brother killed a man, and she remembers the name, Slynt. She’d hoped he’d die too, taken by the others, nose, ears, lips frozen black and gone, agony in the snow. Her brother is merciful, good and just, like her father had been.

 

She wonders if the Boltons will kill him too.

 

***                    *                    ***

 

_What if he is just a bastard? What will he be beyond that if he savages Winterfell’s daughter? She’s wondered. She wonders if he’ll live if Stannis wins. She told him he was a bastard and he showed her the flayed body of an old woman, dead before he got to her face. Later he’d had her, again and again she’d bled a little, less than she screamed._

 

_He whispers to her, soft like a lover at her temple, that she ought not to be so stupid. He wonders aloud how it seems she knows nothing of pleasing men, promised to a King, married before, given to him by a whoremonger from King's Landing, he asks why she knows nothing._

 

_She knows more than he thinks, she know how a man's fingers, all five twitch when the hand is cleaved off, the way a dead man dances when he has no head._

 

_"He liked to hurt me, not pleasing him allowed him to do so"_

 

***                    *                    ***

 

She remembers her dream of being torn apart by the knives of the mob, faceless violence, women like weasels biting at her belly, hot steel and waking up with red between her thighs, a flower blooming, it’s less of a surprise now, unaccompanied by dreams, but she hasn’t been allowed to sleep, and it’s not a flower blooming either, it’s a bride-gift from her groom on that first night. Her maiden blood, and the pain, that night and all the rest that followed.

 

Seeing a man’s shame only made him want to shame you, she wonders if her father did such a thing to her lady mother who’d always hated her bastard brother and never shied from saying it. She thinks of Cersei and how much she hated her King. She wonders if this is why some women don’t mourn when their men die in war, if this is why they let them drink and whore and hunt all while hoping for a rogue boar or a bad belly or a sudden and final pain in the head or the heart.

 

In King’s Landing Shae had spoken of dim lady Lollys, _all they did was fuck her_ , but Shae had been a whore. She’d thought about that during that final night in the godswood, still a maid. _All he will do is fuck me_. And then later, after the first night, with its weeping as witness with the snow falling and the lights going out one by one in the cold and the wind, leading her to a different room, colder and smaller, with old rushes and no fire.

 

And she swore it wouldn’t break her.

 

Swore until she’d known that was all he would do, every night, until she threw herself from a tower or he got bored or she died in a bed of blood having brought forth a Bolton she’d rather strangle than nurse.

 

She opens the casements, wonders how cold she can make herself feel.

 

***                    *                    ***

 

_Sin and shame and castles built on fear that is all the Bolton’s have ever built on top of what they have burned._

 

_H_ _e asks Theon Greyjoy if she’s a pretty bride, asks him for the truth, the pitiful, vulgar truth of his boyish dreams to be a Stark to **fuck** one of Ned Stark’s daughters, have one given to him._

 

_Ramsay tells her not to fret, has Theon show her what he's lost._

 

_"I took all that ever mattered to him, didn't I?"_

 

_Something inside, rotten and awful and unkind could kiss him for what he's done, if only he'd lied, if only she didn't know what his father had done, if only when he touched her he was softer she might pretend she loved him._

 

***                    *                    ***

 

_"He hurts me every night”_

And he does but the way he leaves and the way she lies in bed, is strange and silent. The snow blows in, Theon closes the casements, the maids too and Myranda the kennel master’s daughter. She bangs them open again when they go. Strange, because he’ll take her out and she’ll numbly remind him of his precarious position and then she is stone, she is not Sansa Stark, she is a creature without feelings, she doesn’t feel womanly shame from his rough violations of her modesty or the seething anger that there are those hidden that say nothing, do nothing, the ones that let her be so cruelly used.

The North _must_ remember, no one dies silent while being flayed without good reason, not a single name spoken, she wonders, like Ramsay must, who else remains in Winterfell that remembers what it was like to have a Stark as their liege lord.

 

***                    *                    ***

 

_He used to smile, not now. Ramsay broke his teeth._

_It did not upset her when he whispered it in her ear with the thing who used to be a man, who used to be Theon was knelt by her marriage bed._

_The thing Ramsay calls Reek looks at the floor._

_In the moment it is easy to forget that he killed those farmboys because he couldn’t find her brothers, she’s heard of the men he’d hung, the man he beheaded, the pretty girls from the kitchens and stables who the ironmen took again and again. He didn’t kill her brothers. But only because he couldnt find them. He deserves to die for betraying Robb, he’s earned worse from everything else._

_Theon, had he not been dead, or made into this thing that calls itself Reek and Meek and Sneak and Shriek and Bleak would have given the Dreadfort’s bastard an arrow through the chest as a wedding gift. She ponders the weakness of men, after her lord husband has left, how they cower when unmanned, losing anger that is rightly justified, made women when even women would scream and kill and die. She’d spit and say there’s for the Ward of Winterfell but she is a lady, born, bred, raised, and beaten into._

***                    *                    ***

 

All must sleep, even lords, even ladies, princes and queens, their maester would say when they would not want stay in their beds. Ramsay seems to never sleep. Sometimes she thinks it’s because he might be scared of what it would mean to fall asleep beside her, how easy it might be, some part of her hopes that is the reason, hopes some small part of him knows fear. If he fears then he is not so in control of her as he hopes, not in the way he will let Theon tend to him. But, even then he is awake. He does not fear death by the hands of those he has hurt when he is awake, but still his body knows and somewhere some other part knows it would do no good to lie beside her unaware. It is the only thing that warms her in the night.

 

He brings her out for a last sup before the men march, he needs to, the men of the castle and the retinues they leave behind the safe high walls of Winterfell would question the absence, there is no choice but to give her near enough her own leave of the castle as she is like to get, the most she's had since her wedding, for a night at least. There are guards. She wonders why he seems worried, running away into the rising storm would kill her just as surely as a fall from her tower, from a reckless guard. She sits in the godswood, there are few true northern women as wives. Most of the ladies who remain in the castles pray in the sept, her mother's sept, the one her father built for her mother.

 

Lady Barbrey sits beside the weirwood, tells her unbidden that Lord Ramsay has gone with his men to kill other men in the night. Sansa doesn't speak. She has no well thought prayers for the Boltons, none for Stannis, she prays for her sister and for Jon. She prays. Hopes the Bastard falls.

 

They speak until the guards lead her back to her silent tower. Lady Barbrey looks at her unlike anyone else, there is no pity, no warmth, but it is without disdain.

 

Sansa feels ill, she wonders if it from the heavy meal and the way she was made to share Ramsay's plate, like a true wife would. It made her feel like one of his dogs. She retches and only Lady Barbrey sees. But the guards take her to the maester before they take her back to her rooms, he says it must have been on the first bedding.

 

***                    *                    ***

 

Stannis burned his daughter, burned her for a thaw, the snows are melting.

 

He burned his _daughter_.

 

She waits for twenty men to return or an army to arrive.

 

She waits, unable to decide who would be worse to be greeted by.

 

Stannis _burned_ his daughter.

 

She thinks of what she will do. Flay some small part of herself, strip naked, open the casement to the snow, sit and cower so when men with fiery hearts and stags on their breasts won’t throw her on a pyre with the Boltons. Her mind warped, Stannis’ red witch will see the deception even if the man does not.

 

She thinks of the godswood, oath breakers and kin killers, Greyjoy, Bolton, Baratheon. She’ll jump from a battlement if they mean to burn her too.

 

She wonders if Stannis’ men will rescue her, if they will rape her, if they will kill her, she doesn’t know. She thinks she will survive, the worst has been done, death is final and life is done when the deed is, what’s been done to her is a stain on all the days she will yet see, the deed done and a bloody bed and she survives, night after night, she will survive if she needs to, all they might do is fuck her, she can survive, no man can be worse than the monster that comes every night, all night to her bed.

 

She feels threadbare, over-wrung, a rag no longer fit to be put on the table at dinner to wipe away the filth. She remembers the night in King’s Landing, smoke thick and black and acrid-hot in the air, the Hound and how he might have taken something from her besides the mother’s prayer, she thinks of Tyrion’s sad eyes and Joffery’s disinterested commands for his knights to hit her with mailed hands and the fear of how he would one day send them to drag her to his bed, hold her there. She wonders if she was ever meant for anything but such a thing, to be anything but a thing to be used. She wonders if all other women have felt the same.

 

Her father would have found her a kind man, a good man, a brave man.

 

And she knows she’s been a little fool.

 

Her father would be shamed by her if she hadn’t been what killed him.

 

The coals are hot in the grate, the rushes are old, dry, she drifts, when Stannis calls her to his presence to account for her marriage she’ll liken herself to one of Maegor’s black brides, bare her body to the court, let them judge her compliance (for men don’t oft beat wives who assuage them their demands with soft smiles and open legs).

 

She sees it in the fire, dozing, something pops in the grate, it makes her start, awake, sweating, she moves to dress, make her mind ready for what comes.

 

She picks apart the lock, she did so once in the Red Keep to get to Cersei, to tell her how her father wanted to send her away.

 

She’s never been like her sister, to sit and stew in a room once sent away, she’d smile her way towards freedom, scurry away before being caught Arya always yelled, was always easy to find. But she could always charm a septa, always slink away with promises of more fine needlework, of more pretty skills well-learned.

 

There’s an assurance in her hand. It steadies her more than the candle in her cloak. She can see the banners from the broken tower, and the dead. She needs to go to the godswood.

 

She tries to find the places where Bran would reach to start a climb amongst the stones but in her state she sees only Bolton guardsmen, the snows, the stone, Myranda and Reek.

 

She speaks false words, Myranda speaks the same back. She has no interest in dying and Myranda is less sure of Ramsay’s plans than she, after all Myranda is _wet with love._

 

She would do anything for Ramsay and Sansa feels no pity for a creature who is so like what she once was.

 

And Theon who is Reek looks surprised by what he’s done, she smiles, giddy, but the look that passes from him to her makes her think of doom, unjammed doom, not a song at all. Unstoppable. Futile to struggle against the endless snow of a the long winter and never-ending night.

 

When he doesn’t take her hand and lead her away there’s a feeling in her belly, her guts turned heavy and rocky, ice. Theon is shaking and she knows what his hands trying to grab at her wrists really mean. She wonders if he prays, if he hopes. Those mutilated hands,unsure and futile, he’d said it was the only kindness he could do for her. He’d looked down at the sprawled broken thing puddling red on the stone.

 

And her own hands were stone and strong.

 

She pushes the corkscrew into his belly, through the coiled grey-red squelch of his insides, he looks surprised by what she’s done.

 

Chawdron steaming on the cold stone and her boots to be eaten by dogs.

 

She pushes him.

 

The gates are opening for the banners.

 

Her boats are slick with a Prince's insides and there's a hank of whore's hair hanging from a break in the stone. For a moment the world is quiet, a horn blows and she berays the snow with red boots.

 

***                    *                    ***

 

The godswood’s waters steam, and the weirwood face is one of patience, sad endurance of captives not yet ready to die, of mothers with disappointing children, lords with no legacy, anguish. Their mothers, their fathers. It spoke as she sat, while she waited. She is still listening.

 

She has no cloak and she is cold, she feels it but she ignores it, she is waiting. Her mouth still holds a strange taste, it is unpleasant.

 

A Bolton steward comes, showing her lord the way to her.

 

Like the fire the face with red eyes has made her unsteady, her mind soft, it spoke without words, spoke in a voice like Bran’s might sound if he were almost grown, she can’t remember how old her brothers were, are. The face spoke and the fisted mass of worry and fear in her throat eases, she swallows, the face spoke and she will know soon if the thawing of winter’s first deceptive snow will endure. The fire has gone out in her room, the coals are cold and she already knows who will come across the godswood's soft green needled floor after the steward.

 

Perhaps his mood will be less black with the bloodthrum of victory.

 

Stannis is dead.

 

He comes back in black furs and with bloodied hands, not dead, not yet, she can pray, she has been. There is fear, so suddenly, of what might have been had her prayers been made true. She thinks of Roose and Walda, her heart feels swollen, filling like a pig bladder ball, she wishes it would burst, drown her inside, bleed in the snow, die, softly, quietly, like a lady, like a song.

 

If he dies they’ll marry her to a Frey.

 

_Frey_. 

 

Anger takes the place of her soft, quiet, songlike grief.

 

He says nothing. He looks at her as if he can’t make out her face, the gaze of old half-blind men, he is otherwise blank.

 

He’s played so many games, trying to dance her back into a ditch, make her trip and sputter and cry and hurt. He wears the face and manner of a man but he is not a man, he is an awful nothing, like death or an endless winter. 

 

Theon killed a girl Ramsay had taken to bed, one he might have cared for in the way he cares for the cruelest of his bitches' litters. She killed Theon, Reek, the thing he broke and put back together badly. He is displeased with her. The castle is full of sounds, elation, she wonders why they celebrate the death of a man who might have been King, a man who might have saved them from something worse than a cold winter.

 

He pushes inside of her body, and she wonders if he means to split her, make her bleed and hurt worse than anytime before. He moves like he wants to kill her. He has a knife under her eye, pricking at her skin, pressed to her mouth and down at her throat. He cuts away her gown, too thin for winter, too big now for her frail frame, has her on frost and the under the bosky roof of the godswood, the humus steams with wet heat against her skin. She wonders if Stannis would have burned the godswood the black ironwoods burning bright blue like the eyes of the others, the sentinels with enough heat to melt bones, the godswood may burn but it would never be ash.  

 

“They fear me more than the snow, more than Stannis, they’ll watch me do it.” He knows how many windows and eyes face the godswood, the North watches mute as she is savaged, but then they have been for so long now, they might be blind, the weirwood sees, watches, she's prayed. It's listened. His arm across her throat and his grin, a dead rigor of a man who is a beast wearing another's skin to hide.

 

“Then kill me you fucking coward." She says, softly before she spits on his grin. "Bastard." She smiles. His fades, he presses with his arm on her neck, she squirms, reaches with nails for his eyes, screeches, "Bastard!" The word loud and shrill in the godswood. "The others’ take your ski-..”

 

His eyes are dead things in his face. He strikes her, many times, she cannot breath, he tears her apart inside with his own body, savage and inhuman. He does not speak or scream, no threats or awful promises.

 

“My lord, it would be unwise!” The steward warns, shaking him, stilling him. There are faces in the windows of castle walls, mirrors with ghosts, her mother, father, Robb, Lady walks amongst the trees and she feels the cold, curls on her side and holds her belly, she hurts,  ‘Nugh-uh,” her breath leave in a bare breathed ‘ha-huh’, she sighs and exhales, vomits onto the roots of the weirwood and laughs.

 

“My lord, your wife, she bleeds.”

 

It pulls, the air, like a ribbon from her mouth, it’s a laugh that sounds like a sigh, “Oh, you didn't know, the maester didn't tell you,” she sees his face contort, confusion and nothingness, rage still and then finally, at last understanding.

 

The godswood, surrounded by the castle, it is the heart of Winterfell, the rooms around. Umber, Manderly, Cerwyn, Karstark hear her cry out, hear him speak. She is not the little fool who went to a queen once in a city made of gold and filth far away.

 

Things have changed and the snows only go on, the thaw a deceptive trick of battle that might have been war.

 

Stannis is dead.

 

The Boltons still live.

 

And inside Winterfell she bleeds.

 

Her hands look like the cruor covered claws of the crone and when he's hefted her in his arms and screams for the maester she reaches, touches at his chin and lips. The long ragged strands, a handful of mortling, the lovelocks that might have hung around his face while kissed. It's not at all hard to kill a man while holding his lover's hair in hand. He makes a small sound at Myranda's lank dirty hair dropped like it's nothing. It is.   

***                    *                    ***

 

_She’d thought she’s never seen eyes so full of anger as the Hound’s, even then she’d thanked him for saving her best he could, as much as he was allowed._

 

_Knights are for killing he told her, steel against her neck, her father’s legs had danced when his head bounced off the stone steps of the sept, she remembers._ _He’d said that if there were gods they made sheep so wolves could eat mutton, he’d said they made the weak for the strong to play with._ _He’d told her there were no gods or true knights, but she’d been so sure he was wrong because not all the songs could be, she’d so badly wanted to believe it._

_Ramsay looks at her as if he might kill her if she doesn't die. His father will hear of what he has done, all the castle knows already. He will know shame again._


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for the long wait on this

_“The northern girl. Winterfell’s daughter. We heard she killed the king with a spell, and afterward changed into a wolf with big leather wings like a bat, and flew out a tower window.”_

* * *

 

_Her father would come to find peace or guidance from the dead._

_Her mother would go to find her father in quiet moments, to understand._

_Maester Lewin would take them to the godswood and show them the difference in the plants, the types of trees._

_Arya would chase Bran._

_Bran would climb._

_Robb was always with their father._

_Jon would try very hard to be interested._

_Theon took no interest at all._

_She knows her mother would come to the godswood for other reasons._

_When a girl from the kitchens went off with a guardsman during a harvest feast and started to get big her mother went to the godswood._

_The maester came when her mother was screaming from Rickon’s birth for a second day._

_Her mother was a hard woman, sometimes. Jeyne weeped messily once, over her embroidery, face blotched and nose dripping saying Lady Catelyn had sworn there would be no bastards born at Winterfell and that she would do well to be less brazen with the young bannermen. Her mother had made Kira, the blacksmith daughter, eat roots until her moon blood came after she caught her with a groom in the stables during Rickon’s first nameday._

_Sansa knows the blacksmith’s daughter is dead now, before the Boltons came, dead by an Ironman._

_There’s no grief or upset about girls she used to know now dead and frozen in the ground, she knows only her own pain, her own nights. She wonders if it was ever any different, if she’s always been so selfish._

_Their maester planted knitbone and woundwort, there’s lion’s tail too in the dry shade. Her teeth taste bitter, she pokes her tongue at the tag of root stuck between her teeth. Her gums tingle and she waits. Her body cramps slowly, constant and comforting like her mother’s hand in hers, squeezing. ‘No more bastards in Winterfell.’_

_Her husband finds her in the godswood._

_He fucks her there._

_Something inside of her dies there._

* * *

 

She’s in her husband’s arms. She should be smiling. She is bleeding.

 

There are guards on the stairs, in the corridor and bannermen watch from open halls and doors. In the maester’s chamber Mors Umber has his hand on the pommel of his sword, his eyes hateful and wide with disbelief. She is stone, she is another Lady Stark without a savior. She looks away, dismissive and staring at the uneven stitches on her husband’s tunic, shameful to wear such a shabby made thing.

 

Umber is weak, as they all have been, skirting around her body as she bleeds, no different than before. The man, older than her father was, looks shamed by his hand falling from sword, body turning to make room in the corridor as her husband stomps past. A storm.

 

She is ashamed that they will not survive the winter, these weak old men. Better they die. Better she die. The North covered in snow, a true winter, one that will kill its own Northmen in order to kill everything else.

 

_Northmen are built tough._

 

Life is not a song and no one is brave and everyone is full of fear. None of them are built strong.

 

Not even her cruel husband, he fears his father like a son the lash, or a girl her mother’s palm.

 

There are ghosts in Winterfell and they watch from the rooms, Lady, Father, Mother, Robb. Lady whines, Father weeps, Mother nods, and Robb is a child.

* * *

  

He is short with the maester and he stares down at her earth foul and bloodied body, the sick dripping fever of lasting pain and sudden illness that covers her face.

 

The maester is pushing around him.

 

She wants to speak, to call him a bastard again to tell him she is still far above despite how he weighs her worth by the vulgar standard of a common girl who would beg so soon to die or to be done, to be red and dead.

 

She tries to tell him with her mind, edging grey and black that she would have given much more, done much more, debased herself more thoroughly to be free of pain. How she bought him cheaply on the night he came, her cries and his pleasures.

 

She wants to ask him if he really knows a highborn girl’s worth, tell him a bastard boy knows nothing about it. She drinks from the maester’s cup and he peers beneath the cloak her husband has covered her with, peers between her legs, presses hands against her belly and searches inside with quick sweeping fingers.

 

He looks ashen, and waits to speak words she already knows are true.

 

“Well? Is it dead?”

 

Her lord husband is close to hysterics in his rage. Like a wild hawk, undone and smashing against the battlements.

 

The maester lies and says it is too soon to tell if a babe has been lost. Her mother bled sometimes, crying after, and Sansa knows it was not just moon’s blood. She knows babes can become just bits and blood in the birthing bed, in war.

 

That’s all that’s gone now, bits and blood before it became Bolton. A blessing, truly. From the godswood. From the Lady of Winterfell.

 

There are two more dead, bits and blood and bone and bitch, outside. She smiles around the lip of a cup, drinks to ease pains and bring sleep, always that cup, always for a woman, women in pain and needing sleep, death always welcome in a bed of soiled linens.

 

She wonders if Roose Bolton will offer the ironmen a manbote for their dead prince. She asks softly, though no one listens, though no one answers. She’s worth much more than that, a hundred, a thousand times over. She will not die in a soiled bed of dirty linens.

 

No one will place feathers in her stone palm beneath Winterfell.

* * *

 

_She thinks of Sandor Clegane, weeping quiet, the way Rickon would, boy tears, red faced and so much rage but quiet, dangerous, hurting._

_She thought it made him a true knight despite his ruined face and crude ways and temper and stench and the way he favored killing men._

_She thinks of her father. He was noble, just, kind and true. But his words were like winds and winds were the change of a long summer to an endless winter. A wind that was unsettled, formless, and then gone._

_The dead cannot protect, or avenge, or speak, the dead are deaf, she thinks._

_The dead could not correct and she wishes for him to die, to kill him. She wants that many more times as she bleeds and doesn’t sleep than she ever wished to die in the night herself._

* * *

 

 

She hears Roose say, “If she lives. You would do well to treat her kinder.”

 

She sees Ramsay’s face and there is such fury there. Such black rage.

 

“Now that Stannis is dead there is no cause for a united north, the Freys won’t march to help you, Karstark will go first to reprove their loyalty, their women have heard you at night, the things you say, they’ve heard her, you think they won’t tell their men? Do you think you have enough men left to stop what could happen? Do you think I’ll waste mine? My wife is abed, soon to deliver a _trueborn_ son.”

 

“The maester says she’ll live. I can have more sons.”

 

“If you didn’t ruin her.”

 

She shuts her eyes before they turn to see them open. She prays.

 

“What’s one small girl they might decide is better off dead now that you’ve spoiled her. If you think whores and kennel girls are the same as highborn ladies and fair Starks you’ve…,” there’s a horn blowing at the gate, bannermen returning, “Kevan Lannister has released hostages in hopes to mitigate the damage done by the Lannister woman. Karstark no longer stands with us.”

 

“What more can they do for us?”

 

“You miss the point. If we don’t hold anything to ensure loyalty then what holds the other houses under us…”

 

Her husband’s silence is loud. Roose waits, he has expected it, “…nothing. Nothing but a girl you might have killed.”

 

“We have Umber. And the Freys hold hostages.”

 

“Walder Frey might be dead by supper, and Sansa Stark might be dead because of a whore and a pet.”

 

She speaks as her husband draws breath to argue, “They saw…”

 

“Get the mae-…”

 

“The old gods, they saw you.”

 

Roose is there, his hand firm and loud as words on Ramsay’s shoulder, ‘give her something to sleep,’ he says and the maester does.

 

She lies her head back and shuts her eyes.

 

Her mother whispers, face almost pressed to the pillow. She listens. She opens her eyes when the maester makes her drink. “Who will marry a daughter to that thing if I die?” She slurs, Roose doesn’t look perturbed, she wonders if he’s heard her or if she’d speaking softly in dulcet sleepy sounds. Her mouth is another’s. Robb gives her words. “It won’t matter. They won’t have any reason not to kill you at your next wedding. Another Frey to secure to the north. Does the kennel master has another daughter?”

 

He’s above her, eyes wild, face bloodied by her nails, she reaches for those marks.

 

His father appears unconcerned, she is no danger, not even after all of what’s been done, not after surviving the night, she makes to speak again.

 

Ramsay looks uncomfortable by the notion, by a truly sick woman touching him, a woman made fearless because death might be quite sure and ready. Men fear women, but savage the girls. Women are mothers and whores and maybe more, they might be like men.

 

“He’s going to cut you down, out there, blame Stannis’ mutineers,” She whispers.

 

She might go on, but there are few words he hears: ‘then he’ll smother me in my _sleep_ , rule the north with a new _trueborn_ son. They will take turns cutting off all _your parts_. The _old_ gods _forsake_ kin killers, but you might live for longer.’

 

“You’ve gone pale Ramsay.” His father’s face is a mask.

 

Are you listening well? She means to ask.

 

“He’s going to leave you in the snow.” She’s seen it, seen what comes after, what may come after that, what might happen if he rises from that red snow.

 

They hear her.

* * *

 

_Stoneheart._

_She’s heard it before in a dream. A body in water._

 

* * *

 

 

“They cut your bastard brother like a suckling pig.”

 

She wonders what they’d do to her bastard husband. He and his father have work to do outside the gates. Her husband has come to say goodbye, her eyes are open all the time now. She is healing well.

 

“He begged me for men, for the wall, did you know, after I’d taken you. Did you think he was going to ride here and take you away, did you nurse that hope? I’m sorry to wipe away the scales. They’ve all forgotten, they are all too _scared_.”

 

Her eyes are open but she looks beyond him, over his shoulder or at the burning candle, at the snow falling softly outside or the stone wall. ‘If I die they won’t kill you fast, you will freeze to death in this Hall. You will starve and you will be scared. And at night you will hear things, and when the snows fall hundreds of feet deep you will hear things in the day, the candles will burn away and the Others might come first.’ She might say, it is hard to remember if she is awake and real. Perhaps her eyes are still closed.

 

He leaves.

 

And later, he returns.

 

His father does too, but he is carried.

 

The Karstark girl, whore for ten score wildings, she’s heard them call her, the cause of their misfortune. Masqueraded as Bolton men to lure Stannis’ deserters, and then wearing the fiery heart to deceive him and his father.

 

Sansa would be whore to double to see them die. Again her husband is at her side, knelt close like a lover, like a knight to his lady, he means to gloat she turns her face to see him, “He makes the maester bleed him too often, he’ll die soon. You will not survive the winter alone.”

 

He strikes her. Harder than he ought, harder than he need. The maester is firm, too firm, in saying that she needs rest, no matter what she might say to make her husband think otherwise.

 

“If she were well would she say such things?”

 

Her husband smiles and she knows the maester will not live long after she has returned to health.

 

* * *

 

His scent reminds her of the dark sept, his leathers and fur, the way it was on her wedding night, she might have pretended, she might have smiled but instead in the dark she smells him, she remembers fear. She could wail.

 

“Wait for me, my Lady. I’m going to unite the north.”

 

He brands her, nothing as disfiguring as what slaves of other lands wear but it is a mark and a marring all the same and his retinue of bastard favorites hold her tight as he leaves the flayed man on her back, she wails, the lords hear, they hear and skirt around the halls like frightened women. He sends away his men and takes her before he goes, she is silent and still and he cannot spill inside, gone soft. She smiles, laughs into the furs of her sick bed.

 

He strikes her instead.

 

His father dies in the night, before the son has left.

 

There are the sounds of many in the castle, they are loud through the night, battle and flight, fire and men dying, she comes to herself, she is only listening to the tales of battle, the castle is safe, there are no dead and no flames in the halls, but Ramsay comes again.

 

Carried like his father before him. She has waited, sitting by the fire, washed and dressed and practiced with her needlework, waited for him, wanting for him to see her as she is. Winterfell waiting, the maester has not yet been killed, and Ramsey must be relieved to have let the missive languish in the wake of promises of crossed swords.

 

“You’re home now.” She says, smiles, sits at his bedside, cool hands on his face, on his throat and his eyes open, fear, but she smiles again and returns to her needlework, he is afraid, and he is alone.

* * *

  

_She thinks of songs. Maidens fair, gold and summer in their hair. The night king’s dead queen. That suits. That’s the get of it._

 

* * *

 

She plays the high harp _and_ the bells.

 

“Can you sing?”

 

“We sang in the sept, the holdfast, Stannis was coming up the Blackwater, the queen meant for Ilyn Payne to kill us if Stannis won, no hostages, no rape, no mutilation. She was drunk and Ilyn Payne had my father’s sword.”

 

“But Stannis didn’t win.”

 

“I remember the smell, the fire, I went back to my rooms, watched from the window, I tried to decide what I would do if Stannis won, would I jump from the window, or let Ilyn Payne take my head. Ice was the justice of the North you know, my father’s sword, for _traitors_. He tried to send us back north, my sister and I, on a ship. I was so angry he wouldn’t let me say goodbye to Joffery. I snuck away from my septa, told the queen what he meant to do and how I wanted to stay.”

 

She tells him because it’s something he can’t make more awful, he can’t twist it inside of her like something sharp, it hurts her already, it’s brought her here, back home where a monster was waiting where her family will never walk again.

 

"I killed my father that way. Do you know what happens when you cut a leech?" She pushes her needle through the heavy fabric of his ruined tunic. It's easier than the leeches were. "They pull more blood," she answers for him, "You're father was very pale wasn't he? When you saw him laid out before they burned him?"

 

He is very pale, his eyes fever bright, “Sing. Sing what you sang when Stannis’ ships burned.”

 

She is tired, the words spill without tethers, her tongue too unable or uncaring to keep them in her mouth.

 

She wonders if Ramsay is going to die. She speaks.

 

At breakfast: “Joffery liked to fill kittens with quarrels, but he was so pretty. Like a girl. Lady Margery wanted to marry me to her brother, Loras. He likes to be fucked by other men, or her other brother Willas. He’s heir to Highgarden and a cripple."

 

When the maester tends his wounds: "Tywin Lannister heard about that and I was given to the imp. Baelish had his plots to bring me North, he loved my mother, but he hated her too, and he wants more from me than he says, he enjoyed moving me here, knowing about you, knowing exactly what you’d do to me, how grateful I would be for him saving me when he managed to kill you after you took care of Stannis. Which you’ve done, and now you’ve killed your father too, they say. He’ll marry me himself or to the little lord of the Vale who won’t last longer than did your brother when he brought you to the Dreadfort."

 

When she sups in his chamber: "Didn’t your lord father have Harrnehal? Lord Baelish has it now. If you didn’t know already, It’s strange, you know, how easy it is. All the plots. He’ll own the north, and the Vale, you’ll be dead and I’ll be somewhere else again, taken from my home."

 

When he sleeps: "If you die I’ll have to throw myself from the battlements."

 

At his bedside, pressing linens to his balmy cheek: "I prayed for a beautiful prince and there was Joffery, there was Loras, I prayed for a brave knight to save me from Joffery and from Kings Landing, there was the Imp and Baelish. I prayed for home and fine northern lord, the kind my father wanted for me. The gods don’t lack humor."

 

At the high harp while he eats: "I’m your lady now, for true. You're my lord, we will have one name and one banner and the north has been kings of winter and red kings since before all the songs. You kill and wound well enough, but you’ve never listened to anyone but your father, and he’s dead and the snows are falling like they’ll fall on your body when the Mormonts and the Karstarks and all the rest come to kill you." He smiles, it looks kind, like a boy who has never done anyone any harm. He stays silent as she plucks strings. "You _will_ die, cold, in red snow and mud, they fear you, people feared the mad king, he died. If I die, they will write a song about us and you will be a fool and a craven and so very common. A bastard. You will die like Maegor, on his throne, by his own hand, or so they made it seem so we would all laugh at him.”

 

He is quiet. Eyes sharp and then he breathes, exhales, and his body loosens, languor in his limbs, quiet assent, assuaged, the way his father only managed so often and only when patient enough to explain. There’s a soft smile, it’s unpleasant. She looks away, stone, not a girl at all.

 

“I can sing now, if you’d like”

 

“Yes.”

 

The night king.

 

“Sansa.”

 

“…”

 

“You’re home, and really, you don’t have anywhere else to go.”

 

“…”

 

They have a false accord. He won’t kill her or lock her away, because he can’t. But he will hurt her. She won’t kill herself or him, because she can’t. But she will hurt him in other ways.

* * *

  

He’s afraid of the same things Joffery was, being mocked. Aren’t all men, she thinks, cut deep and low by women’s laughter. It’s pitiful, it’s weakness, to do whatever it takes to keep a man from speaking because of fear of what he might say, she realizes her unspoken chastisement is mocking, desperately she stifles a sigh, swallows it so her lord won’t see, won’t feel shame, won’t feel a need to hurt or wound her as recompense, she can’t stop the one that springs from that. The Boltons cut out tongue and eyes and flay.

 

 _Come to the godswood tonight, if you want to go home_ , a cruel game, that was her first thought. She’d been well versed in such things, it had been what her mind went to first, well fed on so many songs where betrayal ran as deeply as duty or love or blood or honor.

 

She’d thought Joffery was capable of such thought, she measured him above worth, somehow, in some way it’s as much a disappointment as a relief that Ramsay is the monster she thought Joffery was, and she could smile. She’d thought Joffery, boy king and dead now, was capable of such thought.

 

Her lord Bolton is squinting. She thinks her fears were songlike too, once, a headsman under a tree to which she prayed, waiting to take her head with her father’s sword, yes a song. She plucks the harp, her lord Bolton watches.

 

_Better I die than let them hurt me more._

 

She’d thought as much, once, south, warm, so warm it could be summer. She’d have killed herself then, she’d been a summer child then, she can tolerate much colder rage now.

 

She’d been callow too, _‘I prayed to the gods for a knight to come and save me, I prayed and prayed. Why would they send me a drunken old fool?’_

 

Dontos had called himself Florian and she shivered, it was like a song. She loved songs. She slept with them fresh on her dreams. Songs, knights, dead men, _Winter is coming_ , ghouls. Songs said to be a fool, risk, run, what were song but the dreams of true life.

 

Her lord Bolton likes songs, she knows someone sang him to sleep once.

 

She sees how easy it is for him when she harps and hums. He thinks she’s too well-plucked of all self to stab him in his sleep, to take the chance the songs all sing about having been taken, she’s learned to wait, be patient.

 

Florian the fool in the godswood told her she’d have to be brave and strong and above all _patient_. Petyr waited, learned, knew she listened well to songs, sent her a Florian and stole her away, sent her home to where she would win him the north, and a face that reminded him of a girl he loved. She’s her mother’s daughter, family, duty, honor. The Tully words. The North remembers. She plucks hard on the strings. The sour note wakes her lord husband.

 

The Hound, spoke of drink, red, and strong _all a man needs_ , or a woman, speaking of her face and teats and how she’d gotten tall and how that made her look _almost_ a woman, asking and telling her of her liking for knights, and how he _wasn’t_ a knight, not even a lord, she wonders if he’s dead, broken somewhere by the sword or made a coward by fire, he’d have been a good lord, one from a song if he weren’t so afraid, so fortified by wine, so stopped from task by a pretty face and pair of teats and knowing more about knights in songs than broken, sad men or of fear.

 

Sandor Clegane told her dogs can smells lies, Lady could smell falsehood, she’d thought, that night, having gone to the godswood even though she told herself to go back to bed _, I’ll have a song from you, whether you will it, or no._

_I will sing it for you gladly._ She’s been mocking him, he’d known, and done nothing. Coward.

 

Every one a better liar than her?

 

She’d been alive, a maid, an heir, she’d been more valuable than Cersei Lannister, more than Margery Tyrell.

 

What is she now? She’d burn them and their banners for all that, her own slights before those of her brothers.

 

She’d been alive and a maid and an heir.

 

He sleeps and the maester smiles at her, her charms and her music, ever the lady, except when she screams, except when she bleeds and shrieks and spits. Only once, but they all remember what hides behind her small smiles. A bed of blood, she’d thought she’d understood from the first night and all the others her lord came, she understood nothing.

 

Lady Dustin and the Maester and Roose Bolton talking about how she might die. _Save the girl. Whatever was there is dead now. And by the gods keep that beast of yours off of her for a while yet. If he needs to rape something to death he ought to take it to the woods._ Lady Dustin had a sister once, and a nephew. Sansa wonders, like Lady Dustin must, what might have come if Roose Bolton never brought his bastard to the Dreadfort.

 

There’s a hawk with tawny eyes shrieking in the sky, she doesn’t remember summer or warmth, the only heat she feels is when a her lord Bolton wants to wear her skin for a while. She wonders if he’ll be able to when he’s healed.

* * *

 

 

Her lord husband is well again, sitting up, eating, an animal kept from hunting and rutting with a mood growing fouler and blacker by the hour, he’d hissed in her ear that he would have her that night. She’s waiting. Warmed by wine she thinks, thoughts softened by drink and distance and time.

 

Joffery and his crossbow shot a yellow cat, a quarrel through it’s ribs, she skirted around it, feeling ill, not wanting blood on the hem of her new silks, she wonders how many men of the North, brave men, would do the same around her broken bloody bony body if it stood in front of a Dreadfort lord’s chair, blood on their furs to freeze with the icy start a winter long coming, she’s still thinking of Joffery, telling her how Northmen feasted on flesh after a battle, she thought of the Boltons when he’d said it. He told her he’d killed a man the night before, a man bigger than her father who killed her wolf, he reminded her, had been, told her with a steely shining quarrel pointed at her, _and he died?_

 

Her teeth tap, her lips part at the corner, a smile she’s seen her lord husband display, sharp and steel, awful and cruel and she thinks, yes, stupid and fearful she was, but if he’d have shot her then, Joffery, she’d have been sung of as brave, mocking a mad boy king, offering nothing but death. In songs the ladies are all brave and chaste and maids. She’d thought she was brave once, she wasn’t, not when everything else has been undone. But she’s changed.

 

 _Laugh and be satisfied._ She was mocked too, Dontos beating her about the head with a melon headed morningstar. She laughs. It’s cold and catching in her chest. Her chest, bared once before a king’s throne.

 

They’d laughed, sniggered, Joffery yelling for a kingsguard to beat her bloody because her brother won a battle, she wonders if Rob would have bent the knee to save her from the laughter.

 

Men so quick to cower under mockery rarely heed the lot of women who suffer the same, she hates, deep and black how her brother never really won, named himself king and had his head taken like her father. She’d be a better king.

 

Her lord husband has come. She stands, cold, pale, wardeness of a warden of the north, naked, in the almost dark, and his smirk like sharp ice, hungry eyes don’t cut her as deeply as that still summer day where her modesty was saved by a half-man who had more nerve than a king. She was fourteen. Joffery had spoken of fear, never having tasted it. He’d died scared, afraid, in his mother’s arms like a babe never far from teat. Milky breath and bulging eyes, heaving, trying to scream, crying.

 

She’d been angry to learn that none of the knights of Kings Landing were true knights and that the grizzled grey men of the North who had blackened teeth and gout were more noble, more just, more honorable than the bright, beautiful boy with summer in his hair and white gleaming smiles, she hopes they burn, curl and blacken in smoke and oil.

 

Die, screaming. It's disappointing, she wished for better, for more, something from a song.

 

They treated her like a child while treating her red raw and bruised flesh, offering sweet sleep and dreamless draughts, _when you wake, all this will seem a bad dream._

_No it won’t, you stupid man,_ she drank deep what they offered and slept still, like the dead, she wonders how many other little girls they spoke such words to, ravaged, beaten, pretty little girls, told to sleep away the badness of unworthy kings.

 

She feels as Maegor’s black brides must have.

 

She’d had a meal with the Imp, thought of how her brother would kill them all, turn them to another song, the Reynes and the Lannisters, justice finally down to a drowned fortress of people killed because of a man’s pride was wounded, a tongue cut out because of fear for words to be spoken.

 

She’d called her a brother a traitor out loud, used her words, spoke as true as any other lady would. She lies. Exults how they will one day all die, privately, unseen, she remembered her courtesies.

 

The Imp had asked asked what she prayed for in the godswood they all saw her go to _victory_ , _death_ , _home_ , _Winterfell_. Her brother dies, Joffery too, home was not safe, Winterfell has been burned. Her prayers. Answered in part.

 

Ramsay Bolton is not smiling any more, he never does for very long. Smiles that seem to crack and splinter and fall apart and then simply are not there,

 

She’d thought being alone would provide a safety that the comfort of other chambers would not have brought, she’d preferred the sparse and stale to the well-worn and fresh rushes of the bed he would have slept in, the bed that might have been her father’s or her brother’s or her sister’s or once her own, she’d thought that on the night after the first in a small chamber, lonely and cold.

 

And that night after the first night he’d come and stayed the night and had her twice again in the morning, he’d informed her she cried all night, again, as if she hadn’t known.

 

Now, it’s their _chamber_. When he slept without her or with another it was in a bed that Jon once slept in. It give her a small private joy that he sleeps in another bastard’s bed. This she does not tell him. And now the bed he will sleep in is hers, it’s where her father and mother sent a King to sleep in, visiting lords and the like.

 

He has no one else to share a bed with, no kennel master daughter or blacksmiths whelp, no serving woman or highborn widow, what the cold hasn’t made numb new anxiety has, the truth is it is easier to please him if he thinks she wants something, she is cold and he is warm and the very basic need to not feel cold makes his arms easier to bear.

 

His smile is gone and a gasp of wind makes her shiver hard, she starts, looks back at the window, she’s been lost in thought and maybe he’s spoken and waits for an answer, “Would you like to hurt me first,” she asks and he looks unprepared as if she’s already spoiled his pretend game by reminding him of who they are.

 

“Why would I do that?”

 

She almost laughs, but that is childish and false, it’s all clear between them. Near enough, at least.

 

“The Queen used to like to tell me what I would have to look forward too, how some men can’t...do,” she stops, thinks of no new word that is ladylike and poetic, “it, unless they hurt you before. How none of them are ever patient enough to learn anything. And how for some reason it’s always like they might die if they don’t. Should I scream while you have me?”

 

He swallows.

 

“I didn’t know it was a choice, should I test you?”

 

“Do you know how many nights it’s been? How many ways? I know what you want from me, it’s not any different from any other lord and lady, and you’re not any different than the rest of them.”

 

He tells her if she screams he will cut off one of her toes.

 

She doesn’t scream.

 

He can’t harden.

 

And when his fingers tighten over her throat she reaches between his legs, he’s half-soft, she pushes at what dangles down, all lobcock, and she smiles up at him. When he strikes her it stings and her lips bleed, but he leaves, temporarily unmanned.

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There’s a hard blur between what’s dubcon and what’s noncon this chapter in terms of how characters view things. 
> 
> A couple of notes on the Northern Houses mentioned:  
> Hornwood history is tweaked a little to better balance it between book-verse and show-verse  
> Tallhart as it stands here is true to the fact that they are hostages at Torrhen's Square but everything else about what's actually befallen them is up for grabs as far as things stand now in the books. 
> 
> There will probably be two parts after this.

_Love, sweet poison, dead all the same the queen said._

 

***                    *                    ***

 

She sees the houses whose banners hang in the hall, loyal houses who have turned traitor to the name Stark. Still, Winter is upon them and the hearths of Winterfell warm the best no matter who heads the table, no matter the banner, be it a direwolf or a dead man.

 

Sansa looks around the great hall of her family, of her name, the place she sat once in her badly self-made dress, so proud of her stitches her embellishment. She remembers her mother's smile, self-effacing and half hid, amused at her oldest daughter, who was a child still, happy and self-important in front of the woman who was wife to the man who governed the realm. 

 

Governed is the word that should be used, she thinks. It is accurate. The Baratheon's, Lannisters, the Tyrells are too soft to have ever owned any part of the world. It isn't the glory of a single man killed, of gold, or cunning that supplies a world to one person of one name for time until it ends, it is blood, it is battle, it is power. The First Men, The Kings of Winter, The Red Kings, The Dornish, The Dragons. They are not simply, Stark, Bolton, Martell, Targaryen they are where the known world ends, where the cold or the fire comes from. 

 

She'd been called forth by a Queen and she'd been asked if she'd flowered, if she was even worthy of consideration to be consort to a king one day, she was pretty but the books had known pretty but barren queens before. She'd been ashamed that she was still a child. She'd dreamed herself a _Queen_.

 

Back again in her ancestral seat even King's Landing feels lessened, Winterfell is old stone, before the Red Keep was even dreamed of, before the Dragons conquered the worlds. Winterfell has seen Dragons die and be born again if the rumors are to be believed.

 

They dine together. Her eyes fall over all that sit at her table. She puts to use the lessons she has learned from  her father the Northman, from her mother a woman who knew duty above all else, from a selfish queen who knew only her own pain, from a man who believes in nothing and has safe haven in every kingdom, from her own wounds that remind her of the danger in thinking beyond what she can feel for herself.

 

Barbrey Dustin whose sister married and became a Bolton, whose nephew was Ramsay’s trueborn brother once. Lady Dustin, handsome and widowed and too old for sons. Barrowton is hers alone. Her father is old, he will not survive when the cold truly comes and her brothers might yet die in whatever battles they will have to fight for Ramsay, they have no sons and it might come to pass that she will head Lord Ryswell’s seat soon, too.

 

Lady Jonelle of House Cerwyn, heir only because her father and brother are dead, she is not so old to be unfortunate but she is decidedly homely, there are few years left for her to pass her castle to sons that are her own, for her womb to remain flush and for breasts to sit high.

 

The Karstark’s emblazoned sun still hangs in the hall but none sit in audience, Karhold is held by a girl and the wildling horde that she lets have her for their service, their swords. Sansa hears it spoken of through the hushed hall. There are Karstark men imprisoned at the wall, _in_ the wall. Still, the true heir to  Karhold is a captive, not yet dead, a brother who has not seen home since he left to fight in a war started by her own.

 

Robb was a boy, not even a man. He died all the same. Wars were not for boys to play at. Perhaps it was for the best. He'd have been a poor lord she thinks. Her eyes pull forward to the large man, a bulk of furs and beard.

 

The Umber pair is split, one at the Last Hearth as castellan and the other at the high table. They are as much held captive by Ramsay as their nephew, their lord, is with the Freys. They are old men of low cunning,

 

But, not so low as to ever be trusted by Roose, not that it helped, not that it mattered. Roose is dead now and they are still old men.

 

The old man of Oldcastle is from the line of the Kings of First Men made later to serve Kings of Winter. She remembers her septa's teachings, droll and drab, she'd often looked away to the window, watched snow fall or Spring melt the ice lances. Lord Locke feasts on gruel and his hair holds on by small patches of scalp so dry it might simply be blown away by the backdraft when the doors of the hall are shut against the cold of the dying day.

 

The old man is a Locke and his daughter is a Glover, his grandchildren are Glovers. No one speaks of House Glover.

 

The Hornwood moose hangs next to the Flayed Man of House Bolton. She has heard the rumors of how they found the Lady Donella, what they say the Ironmen did to her, but there is only so much to be blamed on reavers. They say the woman’s last words were ones that granted Roose and his Bastard her lands, her men, her banners. Sansa can half recall the simple words of the stolen House, they echo _wrath._

 

No one speaks of the late Lord Hornwood’s natural son released from the captivity of the Ironborn when Stannis reclaimed Deepwood Motte.

 

Sansa reaches to press a hand soothingly to the bitch by her ankles, a big, hulky beast whose breath warms her master's ankles. Ramsay is grinning at the table, at the hall, at all that isn't his. She smiles in a way she had practiced for the Tyrell she was to marry once, light, beautiful, the picture of a maiden in spring, touched by light and with flowers embroidered on her gown, dew on her bare skin in a garden at dawn, a song.

 

A child coughs, harsh, rough and unfit to survive a long winter.

 

Lady Flint’s small sickly son is a puppet with dangling legs, she herself is thin and small, the bodice of her gown sags obscenely, unnoticed to others. Sansa thinks the woman already looks ill but there’s something that lurks behind her eyes, madness perhaps, the animal glint of desperation. Lady Flint will leave once she is well enough to not die on the way back to Widow’s Watch, she will leave her son behind to be fostered. Sometimes Sansa finds the woman staring at her. Lady Flint's other son, grown into a man, was cut apart by the same knives that killed the King in the North.

 

Sansa knows she is to blame, her name was invoked by her brother, her mother, as cause to continue, to go on. She is held close by an obligation she had no knowledge of.

 

The hall grows loud, men who have been filled with ale and the rush of winter not fully upon them, of meat still fresh, there is laughter, there is cheer, and she knows it will not last. There are other names that remain unspoken, even in whispers, _Mormont, Liddle, Reed._

There is one House left, sitting far from the center.  Manderly plays a mummer’s farce. Too fat, too full of gout, too busy eating to be of use, or of danger. His eyes are clear and he does not forgo his wine no matter how much he complains of pain, his plate is never without meat, no one notices how he eats only what should pain him.

 

Lord Manderly pretends but Sansa has been taught to judge a man by what he isn’t doing, the things other’s fail to notice because of the spectacle of his belches, the guffaws, the way his tankard sloshes ale across the table and the finery of others.

 

***                    *                    ***

 

_Margaery never preened to make people to think she was pretty, she was, and when she wanted them to think she was kind she gave alms, smiled, played with orphans in the dirty street. Margaery had acted like a queen should. It’s only because of this she is one. The Queen of Three Kings. It would be a fine song._

_She finds out later what’s happened to Margaery and Cersei._

_Joffery liked to scream he was the king. King king king. And he was killed by an old woman, a whoremonger, a traitor’s daughter and an imp._

 

_Queens were made into whores._

 

***                    *                    ***

 

She finds Lord Manderly to be the most corpulent man she or anyone has ever seen. But, that is also his reputation. They dine together, she dines with a different lord or lady each night, if Roose Bolton where alive he’d never allow it, he’d been so rightly suspicious.

 

Distrust, everyone and always. A whoremonger taught her that, a man without a house, a man who made himself a lord.

 

Ramsay doesn’t know history quite as well as he thinks, and what he does is from the mouths of the little people, like his mother, from the books of history he must have struggled through when his brother Domeric brought him up and made him a Snow when once he was nothing.

 

Ramsay doesn’t know that her father used to dine with a different lord each night.

 

She knows her history, the history of the North, she’d learned it when she was a child, she’d learned it in King’s landing, from the mouths of her kin and the mouths of lions. The Starks have always been the Wardens of the North and what’s written is sometimes only as true as the lie told for a greater good, such was her father’s fate. Ned Stark. Traitor. It's the history he has had his name set to.

 

The Starks have always been the North.

 

Manderly believes it. Many believe it. Manderly is followed by many.

 

But Roose Bolton is dead and Ramsay thinks she will never run, because of the snow, and thinks she would never murder him in his bed, because they’d drop her in someone else’s. A Manderly or an Umber or a Karstark looking to reclaim what’s been stolen by another girl. There are only girls left when all the sons and fathers have died from a war after a war after a war.

 

But even that he’s taken from her.

 

 _I’ll be your husband until you are dead and cold._ He'd promised her that in the night.

 

She wears the flayed man on her flesh. She shifts in her high backed chair, like a throne, one made for winter, as unforgiving as one mad of melted steel.

 

She finds Lord Manderly's eyes, gestures and he heaves himself to the high table. He talks the place left by Lady Dustin.

 

Ramsay has been called away by Umber and the head of the guard. She does not know what stalks in the night but she can wager a guess. Wildlings, or wolves.

 

Manderly is never so stoic as he is next to her. Not when in the company of others. He wears a mask of a man too fat to sit on a horse, to riddled with gout and aches to lift a sword in battle but he has killed Freys, not for her but for the North, for vengeance. She wonders if it has been enough to keep him satisfied for the winter to come. She hopes not.

 

“My Lord.”

 

“Lady Sansa.”

 

“I hope you find things suitable here.”

 

“Warmth in winter, lamprey pie, suitable enough.”

 

“My father said once the Manderlys swore by old gods and new their loyalty forever in exchange for our protection, we did not protect you, when a liege lord falls bannermen have little choice of what to do, I pray I can be forgiven for the faults of my father and my brother. All the grief it has brought to your house.” Her words carry the weight of her grief, her own reformed to her purpose, whatever Manderly has suffered is not something of her own doing, still she can make her tone soft, her voice sweet and her meaning sharp.

 

The mask slips, the stoic one, the one of a man too fat to lift a sword or sit on a horse, she sees something paint Lord Manderly’s face, something fierce and speaking of dead sons killed by Frey’s who might sit a table below.

 

She could be the protection from the Boltons, they wish she was, wish she was more than a pretty highborn lady so that they might be saved, so that they might not fear being flayed or hunted in the woods like common game. She could be their justice. One day. For all they know of her she could already be, she has survived longer than others have. They have not heard her cry out in the night for some time. They have not seen the marks of violence her husband favors on his fresh, young skin.

 

Margaery played the queen in childhood games in gardens with her cousins she told her once. Sansa played the princess in the tower who would be rescued, Robb and Jon would always roll their eyes, she never was rescued. She always ended up scared or cold from waiting.

 

Winter is coming, she cannot wait and she cannot be frightened.

 

She must play protector. She must live and suffer by night, by day, indignity and pain and shame. Her family is dead, her duty is done, her father was honorable and he died, Robb was dishonorable and he died, she does not know what she has left but she can pretend. She’s played a lady in all her childish, childhood games, in the days after her father’s head rotted and was pecked apart by birds, after Theon betrayed her brother, before her lord husband comes and after he leaves she is a _lady_.

 

She’s getting better at not scowling, not retching, of being pleasing, and if not that then at least being silent and still. A lady made of stone. Her mask as strong as the castle walls.

 

Lord Manderly does not smile, he looks off, down and around at the Frey’s, at Bolton men on benches. “You might have been a queen, girl.”

 

She cuts her meat the way they do in King's landing and holds her silverware in the style that best displays the beauty of her unblemished hand, “I am a northern woman, not meant for a southron boy-king.”

 

Manderly scowls until she swallows like a man, and stabs at her plate, hard, uncaring of refined, practiced gestures, she chews her next bite with an open mouth no one notices but the man at her left.

 

“Not meant for a bastard either.”

 

The Bolton men do not hear, but Lord Manderly does not speak it loudly. She wonders how anyone sitting next to him does not notice the strength in his arms, the way his feet sometimes tap to the minstral-made music, he is not an old man with gout, he is not too fat to cut a man down.

 

 

***                    *                    ***

 

_In bed, sore and raw she speaks, hoarse, “My brother had terms, didn’t he?” She knows he did, fair terms, for peace, meager, reasonable, “for peace.”_

_And the Lannisters said ‘no’ Tyrion had said, spewed, heaving over a chamber pot laughing and reeking of wine, sour, tannin, too sweet, like cloves and she had listened, cleaned the mess, and remembered._

_Her lord husband says nothing, but his eyes see something beyond her and the rooms and the North, they see terms on paper with a pink seal they see dreams, a crown, the same things that killed her brother, the same thing his father would have killed him for, tried to._

_Ramsay looks at her askance, wary, so wary, his fingers reaching for the blush red imprint of his hand and its heavy weight still painted on her throat, it will be dusky by dawn, other parts of her too. He is gentle, tracing the blur of a flush, he touches her softly, slowly._

_“Sometimes you are a very clever little wife. I feel like you change once I’ve finished, I don’t know which of you is real.”_

 

_Her silence perturbs him, entices._

 

***                    *                    ***

 

“Do you hawk?”

 

“A little.”

 

He regards her from across the table in their chambers, something stalks in his gaze. He measures her worth and perhaps for once does not find her wanting.

 

***                    *                    ***

 

“I want something. A gift, something from a lady to her lord.” His tone is lofty, and then low when he presses close, she tries not to shiver. “What sort of gift?”

 

“You know me well enough by now.” He grins, teeth and cock, "Surely, you do." He boasts, jests.

 

She can only nod as his mouth touches her throat and the heat of his tongue taps her pulse before he is called away by his councilors.

 

 _Don’t disappoint me,_ he's warned with a whisper.

 

She makes ready for a hunt.

 

She thinks of Joffery with his crossbow, no skill in it and says later with her eyes on the dead thing Ramsay has brought down and then lets his bitches take apart, “That’s not a kitten.”

 

It’s not a girl dressed as a maid of summer with flowers in her hair.

 

It is an Ironborn boy they caught trying to escape a party of wildlings who'd tried to take Torrhen’s Square for themselves.

 

He wants her, later, has her roughly, there are spots of red on the sheets from her mouth and her pale thighs are dusky colors, she’s left shaking on the furs, he touches her tenderly when he’s finished, fingers slicking through the mess between her legs. Her toes curl, not altogether unpleasantly. She resists enough that when she relents and cries he feels as if she’s his, still by enough force that he doesn’t feel like he’s lost.

 

Nothing mourns the dead thing being eaten by his hounds. She’s heard talk of what has befallen the captive Tallhart women, who have been kept alive only because they are wived to reavers now, she thinks of Eddara Tallhart, a Lady. A beauty, they all say. Said, soon.

 

The craven son of a reaver she chose to die telling the Oldman of Oldcastle, “She’s safe, I swear. She’s the Son of Dagmar’s salt wife now, she’ll have a babe put in her soon, by the son or the father.” He had laughed and leered as he spoke.

 

Ondrew Locke had risen from his seat, struck eight teeth from the boy’s mouth with his cane and kept hitting him, he’d lost an eye before Locke shook with a cough and hocked up white froth to spit down at him.

 

Sansa remembers that Locke's daughter is a Glover, she remembers that his daughter’s children are held as highborn hostages in the Iron Islands, taken from Deepwood Motte to ensure her compliance. Sansa he wonders how old they are, she hopes they are grandsons.

 

***                    *                    ***

 

_“If you lose his witch woman will burn you, alive. And if you do die and they don’t burn you you’ll be an other.”_

_She told him once, whispered in the dark, at her harp, him under the furs, like a child and a mother._

***                    *                    ***

 

Another time, there’s a moment, he wants to see her cry, watch her face contort and scrunch but she’s the stone face of her own tomb, her body, plaint, limp and he stops, her brow furrows and there’s the wince that springs from the awful and hard jerk and thrust, her eyes slip askance, from the wall to his face. She put fingers to his mouth presses at his lips, damp, cold, “your mouth is so pale”, her smile is soft, easy. His lips are thin, he has a man’s mouth, for what worth that has. Not plump and pink and girlish, or ghoulish like a pair of worms. He has a mouth fit for a man and he does not seem to know what to say, he stills, sticky and damp and skin cooling, she touches his chest, sighs very deep, turns her eyes again to the wall and he is still.

_It’s like lying with a man already dead_.

 

He might see her small twitching smile, hiding about her lips. She is going mad. He is still. She sighs, heavy again and her breasts brush his chest, cool, sticky, damp, “that’s good.” She assures him before she goes silent again and he remains, hot like unforged steel inside of her body, pressed womb-deep. He shifts and she squirms.

 

"Shall I call the master for your sudden muteness, are you unwell?"

 

Hand over her mouth, eyes lidding heavy and his knees planted deeper , the cradle of her hips pressed down by his bulk, the roll and loll, she can pretend the sudden elation of her body is something of magic, love, but it is a game, it is cruelty.

 

She is not so cold, suddenly and if he doesn’t speak she can pretend, they could be a song.

 

***                    *                    ***

 

She slips off her shoes, thinks of mad axe slaughtering his brother’s in the nightfort, a monster in the dark, the shadows make him look gaunt, gray.

 

“It’s the hour of the wolf, wife.”

 

It is another game.

 

She unlaces her heavy gown.

 

If she waits too long his mood will worsen, if she doesn’t play at all he’ll be disappointed and unsatisfied, he’ll become bored, he’ll insist of being properly entertained. She understands his moods. How they shift.

 

“I thought you said you had a surprise, that I would like it, I think you were lying so I wouldn’t punish you." He sing-songs in half-tones.

 

“Don’t turn and I’ll tell you. No one else comes down here, but there are so many eyes, maybe they can hear, all the Kings of Winter watching."

 

She is a ghost in her shift and stockings, white and red, a candle in the dark crypt. She knows he is a man, under everything awful and cruel he is a man, she’s the most beautiful woman in Winterfell, the most beautiful he’ll have chance to see with Winter upon them.

 

She pulls open his leathers, removes his tunic, unlaces his breeches and boots and when she’s crushed to his front she wonders at how such simple things have kept him so free of malice, he hasn’t been harsh with her yet. He pulls her astride, reclines against an effigy of an ancestor she does not know the name of.

 

He bows his head to put his mouth on her shift, it’s damp around her breasts, he thumbs each pink point tenderly and she moves slowly. The fear in her has brought something else, expectation, it flutters in her gut. His hand settles on her throat, he squeezes.

 

He asks what she thinks the northern lords watching would do if he choked the life from her, and his fingers press tighter, others in her hair, yanking and she’s fury, red anger. She reaches and tugs between his legs at the soft sac of him, he heaves a breath, unexpected, doesn’t let go of her tender, bruising throat or her candle flame hair, she doesn’t either, but his eyes, the change, suddenly there’s something else, more attention, notice, not just a taunt. Her loins feel like they’re swallowing, he shivers and black spots on her vision, swimming around his face blotting out parts and pieces of his mouth and eyes, he let’s go, she breathes a half gasp before his mouth covers over hers, and she squirms, tugging hard and he howls, in pain. His mouth surprised and excited, biting at hers and he’s turning her to her knees.

 

He howls, mocking the dead, and the deed, and her, he laughs and she startles at his hands on her breasts, a hand in her hair pushing it behind her, sweeping it away from her shoulders and guiding her to rear up.

 

He has a man’s hands and a man’s arms, they hold her, his heavy palm at her sex and it feels like she’s put her head over the hot pools, she’s heat and dizziness and the most beautiful woman in the North.

 

He brings her off as she's heard half whispered and half shrieked about, she lies panting after he’s spilled inside and on her thighs. He looks at her as if he’s never seen her before, as if he’s unsure of what has happened. They know they are playing at a game but she wonders how sure he is of it. She knows women have a power between their legs but it feels different than that, she feels like she has her hands holding something more tangible and real. His interest, his imagination. His throat.

 

Margaery talked about this. Sansa watched her with Joffery. Thoughts come together, as roughly as their bodies have, he sits her in the lap of some ancient king and presses the awful slickness and heat of his dangerous mouth where he has already been inside of her.

 

She weeps of relief, free of the pain that accompanies his small victories in the night games he longs for.

 

***                    *                    ***

 

Umber tells tales of Tarth as they break bread, no stress to his words, he tells of a ship come in to White Harbor and them telling the tale, someone asks if the Lord’s daughter was truly the proportions of a bear, and the man telling tale yells ‘they say she had six teats too’, Ramsay wonders out loud how such a woman remains a maid, and “Wasn’t there a wilding who is husband to bears, killing your men?” Ramsay asks of a lesser Karstark, cast out from Karhold for betrayal of its insurgent whore lady in favor of a dead Uncle killed at the wall. “It’d be an easy thing to sway him, find Lord Tarth’s daughter.”

 

The men around her laugh mightily down the table to the hearth, but Umber sits close to the burning tapers, his hand passes over the flame, he glances at her, a scant moment, no longer. She thinks of candles in the highest tower.

 

Later as she hawks for her lord husband's amusement it is Lord Umber who steps forward to challenge, no one hears them exchange words against the wind and the drunken shouts and exclamations of merriment on a day so unseasonably warm in the wake of what's to come. The final winter, what might kill them all within the fortnight.

 

“Lady Brienne failed my mother, she failed me. They say they could not find my brother’s body, that they could not burn it, there is something hunting out in the snow, hunting my husband’s men now, a white wolf who is really a warg. Tell her not to fail my brother.”

 

Her hawk cries loudly as it ascends and circles.

 

"The North Remembers." Umber speaks to the sky.

 

Sansa scoffs.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sansa is moving along a scale of light to dark, not to say that's bad or imply anything beyond her character in this, it's a forced progression for sure but there's some need to it to. There's room for interpretation here is what I'm trying to say.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So we are more than half-way done, this is already longer than I thought it would be, I really never thought I would enjoy writing this as much as I do

_"And the stars in the night were they eyes of his wolves, and the wind itself was their song."_

 

* * *

 

She does not look behind her, leaves behind the half carved blocks of stone in the dark at the very beginning of the crypt. One looks like Robb another Rickon, between them are four thrones, solitary, four wolves guard the North’s favored children. Her own whines as she leaves it behind.

 

She walks the hall of dead Northmen, down beyond level below where there is Brandon her uncle, Lyanna the she-wolf, and her father. She walks beyond her grandfather.

 

There are the brothers Rodwell and Beron who when they both died caused four Stark widows to make claims for their children. The wind is voiceless but the damp stone is feathering with patterns of ice.

 

She remembers the names from her lessons.

 

Artos the Implacable who was not a Lord but went beyond the Wall to stop the wildlings and avenge his brother, William who was beheaded. Donnor Stark their brother ruled Winterfell but his statue seems smaller, less important than the brother who was a hero, or the other who’s death brought war.

 

Rodrik Stark the Wandering Wolf, a sell sword, she knows she is dreaming because even he is there, he stands and gives his back to her, she does not see his face.

 

He is defiant, not ashamed and his steps grate and grind on the stairs, he leads her to Torrhen, the King Who Knelt, he points her towards the ones who never knew dragons nor cause to knew.

 

She follows to where there are true kings, even the ones whose crypts have fallen into the earth. She knows she dreams.

 

Edwyn the Spring King who never knew Winter.

 

Brandon the Bad who raped his brother’s bride.

 

Walton the Moon King who walked the walls each full moon and attacked his enemies each new one.

 

Edderion the Bridegroom who was betrothed to a daughter of every northern house, each dying before he came into his kingdom, his throne is made of women’s bones and one his belt are braids of their hair.

 

Somethings moves in the dark, moonlight slipping below the ground for her to follow. In the glow of torches lit by shadows and a ghost who has walked before her into darkness she steps again down roughhewn stairs.

 

Edrick Snowbeard who ruled for near a hundred years, raised the walls with spells won from the witch women born of Wargs, his great-grandson Brandon Ice Eyes reclaimed Wolf’s Den, gave the slavers to the slaves who hung their innards on the Heart Tree as tribute to the old gods and their steel eyed king.

 

Benjen the Sweet and Benjen the Bitter stand on either side of an empty throne. They were men who shared the same sword and fought battles as the other. If not for the peace they ruled over their small, clever games might have spawned war. Even the wife of one could not tell brother from brother if they remained silent.

 

The shadow or the shaft of light she follows is neither, it is the night’s creature, it belongs to a King, one who does not yet hold court with the ones she walks further below to greet.

 

Rodrick won Bear Island in a wrestling match because he was bigger than a bear, Rickard defeated the Marsh King because he trusted no compass on the feel of the land, Jon built Wolf’s Den because hi son that loved the Sea.

 

Jonnel One Eye raises his tankard as she walks, Dorren Giant-Killer drinks from a skull deeper than a bowl, Barth Blackswords wears goatskins and carries two axes he grins a black smile as she passes.

 

She feels something rush up behind her, its fast passage stirs wind in her skirts and warmth in her blood. The air carries an animal smell. She breathes deeply.

 

The steps are made of earth now.

 

Theon the Hungry Wolf was first to bring Stark and Bolton to common cause, whose only joy was in war.

 

Brandon the Shipwright is but an empty throne, he was, never seen after setting sail.

 

Brandon the Burner threw pitch on his father’s ships in grief.

 

Brandon the Breaker who no castle could stand siege against.

 

Bran the Builder who no land could tame.

 

The final set of stairs are made of ice.

 

There is a solitary throne and a wolf settles against the boots of the King that sits there.

 

There are songs sung about him, about her. Ones without words, ones of wind, the North knows them,

 

The Night King might have been a Stark, he might have been something else.

 

She remembers songs and a child’s games, He is the monster and she is the maiden. She has come into his castle. He is lord of the crossing and she has asked to pass. She is the rat and he is the cat.

 

Perhaps it is not so.

 

_Sansa._

 

She weeps for so long the wind goes silent, and sleeps as she takes its place. The ice greets her limbs and as he comes off of his throne. Her fine gown tears under his scarred hands and her flesh bruises under his teeth.

 

The final king of the north has a face she mocked once, now she might touch it if only he’d allow her, weep over her own callousness. He touches her mouth and her eyes and his mouth tastes her frozen tears.

 

When he has her it is like spring come again and then he is no longer a man but the beast that has brought her to him, and before she can keen out as a woman she howls as a dead beast of its own kind. She has the name of a lady.

 

 _Lady_. She's nothing but a shade.

 

Her skin is torn by claws and her throat touched by the humid jaws of an animal, a man, a king, a beast made of a winter storm and a dead name.

 

She leaves marks on his skin, tears at his hide and pulls at his fur and finally she is sated and he has spilled deep inside where nothing will ever take root again, not from his dead seed nor from her cold womb.

 

Still she hopes and suddenly winter is not as dark or as cold as the tales have told.

 

The dead don’t feel the cold or time, they walk through the dark without torch.

 

A man laughs on a throne made of ice, a beast licks the cold from its paws, she stands among a court of Kings, they bow in turns.

 

They call her Queen of the North and in the dark she can see the final King’s face, she remembers and she mounts the steps of his throne to mount him before she wakes.

* * *

 

_She howls between verses of a song she has played before for another man who calls himself king, warden, husband_

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and the end game begins, all of the northern kings mentioned are book canon, I added some story bits for the ones who have epitaphs but no stories to go with them, at least not yet.


	5. Chapter 5

_“Tainted blood is ever treacherous.”_

 

***                    *                    ***

 

All the men are dead. King Robert, Renly, Stannis, Joffery, Roose, Ramsay. Eddard. Robb.

 

And she knows because she feels it is so that Bran, Rickon and even Jon make up some part of what is buried under the snow. Dead they are, as she knew them.

 

She can hear Bran in the Godswood. In her dreams she’s seen a savage black wolf with long matted fur follow a man who could be her littlest brother grown. Men tell stories about the dead-life warg who steals past the Wall and the one thousandth lord commander of the Night’s Watch is painted as the coward who killed him.

 

She’s met commander Thorne, come down to Winterfell to ask for more men. Ramsay sent the sons of the houses he trusts the least. She does not think Thorne is a man to be controlled, he is a dog meant to be slaughtered. When stories are told over mead and she sings at her harp the songs about the Wall and it’s magic he pales like an Other, scowls more deeply, speaks less than little.

 

“You’re the great Lord Snow’s sister aren’t you?”

 

He looks like a smug root vegetable she thinks, she says, “I am Lady Bolton, we don’t speak of bastards during supper in our hall. You should ride out tonight.”

 

The bitch at her feet growls from somewhere in her jowls.

 

***                    *                    ***

 

It is midday, she has been abed, her fine gown torn and her hair mussed, her husband had left before dawn but the weight of him and his scent lingers. He comes unannounced and she is by the fire, dressed in furs.

 

“You haven’t bathed.”

 

“The kennel girl never came, I forget her name.”

 

“You mean the girl from the kitchen.”

 

“Yes, that’s right. She must have forgotten.”

 

“You should have sent for it.”

 

His jaw is tight when she turns her head to glance at him, he has been scouting the forests and has found nothing, no wildings, no makings of old fires or camp, no tracks. He is leashed fury that has visited her bedchamber for three nights in a row.

 

“Why would I do that, my Lord?”

 

He likes her bathed, scrubbed pink and sweet like spring. The night before he pulled her from the water to fuck her on the stones.

 

“You haven’t been listening well lady wife, that upsets me.”

 

She rises, smiles gently. He does not smile back, he does not startle, he is used to her games, she has found different ones, she has changed the rules.

 

“You misunderstand,” her furs sweep the floor and her undone hair trails through the brown-black of the bear skins like a final wound, “come.”

 

“What?”

 

The furs fall open under her hands, baring skin and the red floss between her thighs before they are hefted up and held close to her skin again. “Come, husband.”

 

The Godswood greets her as it always has, silent, steaming, listening for prayers, greedy and mute. She unlaces his ties and stays, undresses him after she stands, pale and bruised and no less a beauty, the brand he’s put on her is all risen edge under his hand as it reaches for her.

 

They sink down together into the water, and she settles like a lapling pet over his strong thighs, his hand presses then holds then squeezes her throat, he is unamused, he has grown weary of games, his prey has escaped him and left no trail outside the gates and his mood is black and foul, he wants to do her harm.

 

She speaks softly, a murmur that might be the wind. “This is unwise.”

 

His kiss is a promise of the pain he will have her feel before he is sated, “Do not tell me what is unwise.”

 

She brings up her eyes and lets them rove high to the windows, the mirrors of ghosts who would be dead but still seen and heard, “They want you dead.”

 

There are noble house still waiting for the snows to lessen before they travel to their own hearths, they might look out upon the Warden of the North and his Lady, she might cry out as a woman for the man to be inside of her, with joy and relief and wonder or she might scream and thrash and choke on the water and bring his men’s faith in him lower than it already is.

 

“You will not be happy to have played this game, Sansa.”

 

“What’s the matter? I thought you would enjoy this, the serving girls would come to the hot springs, my brothers would watch,” she points with her chin, “that was Bran’s room.” She touches her cheek to his a sighs, his cock twitches happily inside of her.

 

He lets her put his hands to her breasts instead of her throat.

 

“It could be always like this.” She whispers and sighs again when his tongue licks up her throat, across a bruise he has left from the night before.

 

***                    *                    ***

 

The White Wolf bat fowls at night with his wildling horde, they steal ravens from their paths across the cold dark, no messages leave Winterfell to find the hearths they were meant to perch at, the wildlings feather their arrows with the spoils of birds they mistake for crows.

 

She is drawn to the practice yard by the hirrient screech of a hawk in the sky, one she has seen before, it drops its bloody prize on the stones on the stair in front of her feet, a starved rabbit. It’s warmth radiates through the leather of her glove to her hand, it is so slight a meal she might have left it but she gives it instead to one of Ramsey’s lesser bitches. It slobbers happily and comes close for her to rubs its fat jowls. Its name is Myranda.

 

The hawk calls and it waits on the wall of the gatehouse, from its beak falls a blue stone, a pebble painted to be a sapphire.

 

***                    *                    ***

 

 

The White Raven comes from the Citadel and her lord husband announces a feast, their supplies are vast but even she understands the sins of wastefulness.

 

A feast nonetheless is prepared.

 

 

***                    *                    ***

 

The men tell him in the solar as they break fast:

 

“The snows are rising, my Lord.”

 

“The drifts are getting higher, daily, we shall not be able to continue outside the walls.”

 

“Nothing today, just a red fox, hunting for what’s under the snow.”

 

She walks the battlements by her husband’s side and watches what moves in the snow, closer like dread fate and judgement. The red of a fox’s hide appears and then is gone.

 

***                    *                    ***

 

Lord Commander Thorne was slain in the night. By wildlings, by ghouls, by dead men seeking vengeance.

 

A raven flies onto his solar’s sill, taps at the window, it pecks at his hand and flies back into the storm.

 

**“House Mormont knows no King but The King in the North Whose Name is _STARK_.”**

 

They say the Mormont’s are skinchangers, she doesn’t care what they are, she survives a beating that is the worst of recent memory because of their fine humor and wit. 

 

***                    *                    ***

Barbrey Dustin looks ill, Lady Jonelle even worse at her side. The young heir to house Cerwyn, the boy with puppet limbs died in the night, his final lopsided thread cut by a kinder fate.

 

The Karstark black and white banner waves over empty chairs.

 

Frey’s are everywhere, happily drunk, hungry and mean. Lady Walda is fat, her colicky child is not present, Ramsay serves her meat pie from his own plate and Sansa offers hers to the bitch at her feet.

 

The Umbers are farthest from the hearth, they have offended her husband by being old men with tempers that rise and fall like the storms approaching. Lord Locke remains as sturdy as stone and Lord Manderly helps him to cut his meat, they remain by the stair. If possible Lord Manderly looks fatter.

 

The Hornwood men sing. Boldly, like the are walking towards the end.

 

She harps and sings and even plays the bells, her Lord Husband leaves with Lady Walda and returns alone, the dogs howl in the yard.

 

She smiles and sings again. _The Night King and His Dead Queen._

 

The Umbers and the Old Man of Oldcastle have taken their leave well before Ramsay has hauled her up from her harp, Frey men take servant girls atop spilled ale and the bones covering the tables.

 

Lord Manderly rises and looks away when she herself is lifted to the table by her husband and her skirts are pulled up, her fine stitches destroyed so he may mouth at her breasts like a beast, he is drunk and thrusting, and he takes a moment to feel what she does to him, he had not noticed Lord Manderly’s armor and the great halls sudden chill as the Umbers opened the doors while Lord Locke hobbled his way to the gatehouse.

 

He is well ganched before the wildings come. A drinking horn made from an elk and a harvest gourd, it belonged to his father and she has pushed it far into his neck, his blood is hot on her breasts. His cough is dry but her face is wet from the spray of his life and his hands try to strangle her, he spurts between her thighs, hotter than his blood. She cants up to find her own thrill in the act. 

 

The great hall is grinagog half-men who wear white animal skins, they slaughter Freys, Manderly cries out something and they answer, they fight together.

 

It is like a dream as she walks, leaves the hall, she is in the Godswood again, waiting. A bloodied man-at-arms who'd hid while she murdered his lord tries to cut her face, he doesn’t entirely miss, her lip is fire and her cheek is stung by a lashing of pain, no worse than what she has felt before.

 

A man's blood is up when he kills and the man who served her husband might fuck her before she is cold and red and dead, she hambles him, breaks his foot with a fallen branch, he topples and curses her, she holds him under the waters, her weight on his back and her gown askew, her blood and his and then there is the wash of her life, and the chill of seeing where he has pierced her, between her ribs, barely felt, and she slumps over the dead man she has drowned in the Godswood’s hot waters,

 

The man they call the White Wolf, who is just a man after all, finds her, her avering form curled towards the tree where their father always sat in reflection, a dead man at her feet, blood on her hands and teeth and breasts.

 

She is dead but still he calls for his wilding witch woman who has sworn herself to his cause.

 

***                    *                    ***

_The warrior witch Morna removed her weirwood mask just long enough to kiss his gloved hand and swear to be his man or his woman, whichever he preferred._

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tormund is the fox, cause he has red hair. Get it? The snow drifts are like the trees from Macbeth. And morna the witch woman is book canon, she holds queensgate along the wall for Jon. One chapter left!


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guys, woah. The response to this has been unexpected and really wonderful. Anyway here's the final part.

_They call her the Red Queen of Winter because they all remember the Boltons, some whisper Bolton’s Bitch in the south._

_Stoneheart and Redstark the wildings know before they know the names that her mother and father and sister and brothers called her._

_"Hold the North."_

_S_ _he hears it in dreams, it sounds like her dead brothers, her lost sister, her lady mother and her noble father speaking all at once._

 

* * *

 

 

The Red Woman who brought her brother out from the silent warmth of an endless dark was hanged long before they came down from the Wall to stalk the snow before Winterfell in the white furs of pale snow cats and seals.

 

She survives because of a frog girl from the Neck, a witch woman in a weirwood mask and her brother Bran. When she wakes she tastes blood and the green mustiness of old moss, her eyes are sore and her limbs are stuck.

 

Howland Reed’s daughter had dug a pit and covered her in ensky mud and summer wine, stuffed her with old root and moss, mouth and sex. The witch woman Morna made words with the luck of her hair, her pain, her rage, an embrocation of verse and old magick to cover her flesh and make her walk and sing and kill again. Bran tells her in dreams that she cannot die, that she must remain. She laughs and screams and howls and curses her little brother and his white eyes and the white bark curling over his limbs. It was near painless to die, there was no hunger, no distress, no duty. He reminds her that family comes before duty.

 

The water of the hot pools covers her body, her eyes, her mouth. She can breathe the wet heat of the Godswood and taste the too muddy water, she heals and living again hurts worse than any previous pain.

 

It is ten days before she sputters and chokes and tries to splash free of the mud, the thin shift, or shroud, that covers and bares her all the same with its thin transparency sucks her down as she struggles to rise from her waterlogged bed.

 

Morna the Witch screams a rattling echo, a shriek and a chant and she might tell the her to cease if she could find her tongue, she spits mud and root and leaves and then she sees him.

 

He wears black but he crouches like his white wolf. There are scars on his face and his eyes are half-cast, he doesn’t help her from the water, neither does the witch, neither does the frog girl sitting on the weirwood limb above them, peering down from the red leaves. Meera Reed's eyes are milky.

 

“The lady’s long durance is done.” He says, laughs like a storm.

 

Her hands find no purchase in the mud and it takes the entire hour of the wolf to drag herself from the water. She slaps mud on where he is watching, only then does he grin and lift her bodily from the warm dankness of the earth, her toes slip and try to find purchase on his boots.

 

“What did you see?”

 

His voice is gruff but his breath is warm where the mud sticks tacky and cold now in the wintry fog.

 

“I saw you.”

 

He lifts her into his arms and takes her to the Lord’s chambers. Brienne bathes her and Meera feeds her leeks and venison broth, her eyes are no longer Bran’s but Sansa knows she will see him soon.

 

* * *

 

 

It seems like a bastard’s appanage in the North is always to be a dead father, a stolen house, and a cold bride. She tells this to him. The White Wolf laughs, the fire has made his eyes dance and ale has made her bold. She is still abed and he has come every night to sit close and look at her.

 

“Bride, Sansa?”

 

“You stole me didn’t you? Isn’t that what Wildings do?”

 

“Aye.”

 

He goes very still, the way he seems to do, the way that seems to be natural for him now. She’s known somewhere that this is what would come to be. She told him she’d dreamed of him below Winterfell before he came to kill the men who stole it from their family.

 

He’d seen her too.

 

He'd fucked her there, in her dreams. She'd fucked him, in his.

 

His hawk calls on its perch by the fire.

 

He can move in the bodies of wolves and birds, he’s told her Bran can move in the bodies of men and giants.

 

Jon looks at her like a man looks at a woman, hungry and hot and she’d flush and heat under his gaze but now all she feels is some desperate lack in her, something she brought back from the dark.

 

“Do you feel it too?”

 

He nods.

 

“Does it ever go away?”

 

He nods again, turns to the fire as if the answer she wants is not one he wants to give.

 

She aches, he knows. It isn’t all for him. Most, it’s to feel again what Summer is like, not the endless Winter blowing cold and cruel inside of her. They’ve both seen the dark, whatever else they share does not seem as weighty as that, whoever came together to make them is dead and she doubts words could shame either of them now, _brother, sister, blood, Stark, snow, Snow._ All words, words without meaning.

 

* * *

 

 

The North is so far from the South.

 

Still they ride.

 

The Neck is held by moving castles and men who are never seen. Bran’s woman slips into the swamps and slides out again followed by frog men with their boots made of lizard leather, their magicks and their strange dangerous ways.

 

The Eyrie and its Bloody Gates she sees from horse, not so long after the first time, she remembers how Sweetrobin clung to her in the night, scared, frail, so weak, she imagines him scream, the long way down. She’s heard what’s happened. She’s heard about the schemes the man who bought and sold secrets like whores, like her, like the little boy who clung to her skirts when all she could dream of was home, _Winterfell._

 

She thinks of Littlefinger’s surprise. Killed by a wildling lord, a bastard, a wolf.

 

She asks Jon after the deed is done, after the man is dead, what Littlefinger offered him for betrayal, because Petyr Baelish would have offered something to try to save his small, black and wretched life. Her wildling lord who has climbed the wall two handfuls of times and walked in a hawk and a wolf and a bear, who has watched her play the harp in her hall with heavy hot eyes says he was offered a castle and gold and his choice of maid.

 

When Lannisters come up the Reach it barely stalls them on their way home. Nine parts mess, one part magic. The spray of blood on the snow from the loosed arrows and the heat of coiled guts on her arm, the steam the cut men make in the winter gusts is magic, it’s not war in the way it’s been made in King’s Landing, it’s simple and fast and brutal. It is the North against the South and Winter has finally come.

 

She secures the banner man and marches back towards home. Jon does not smile but the scars on his once beautiful face pucker and pull like he pulls at her from his own saddle, their horses trot and their mouth collide, teeth bloodying lips, sighs turning to fog.

 

* * *

 

 

He comes to her chambers and she places her stitches in a new gown, she embroideries the sharp teeth of a beast onto the breast of it and he simply stands, stares at the needle pushing through the heavy wool, she can hear him breath and something between her legs comes to life and he seems like he might soon start to pant. She puts away her needles in their etul and rises, he’s already pulling at the stays of her dress, turned her to yank her from it.

 

Despite her scars she knows she is eesome and well formed and his cock is heavy where it rises from him, she aches, damp and readied and waiting for much longer than seems necessary.

 

He goes to floor, knelt but looking more powerful for it and pulls up her knee to drape it over the rise of his shoulder and his laving tongue slicks her, suddenly it’s the blissom of lust, like a ewe in summer after the snows have melted. She goes up on her toes to press herself more fully over his mouth.

 

His teeth print sweet rings around her breast and he weeps a damp trail of heat over her navel with his cock. It feels good inside of her, and she holds him close, braced against the storm of his hips with her feet pressed to the warm stone. Death has made him restless and her unbound.

 

She wants him to rut her on the furs by the fire and when he does she can only preen and press closer while he moves more steadily than she might have thought a man could, he asks if it is pleasing enough, he wonders out loud when she’ll voice enough satisfaction that sleep will be what she asks for next, his bollocks are heavy and they slap at her after he finds the end of each full stroke, she shivers, he trails a finger over the length of her naked spine and holds the weight of her breasts in his large, strong hands.

 

He laps again at the place he has made her feel such tender hot joy after he’s spilled and made a mess of her. She wonders allowed the same as he has when it will ever feel like enough, she doesn’t think she could tire if he persisted until dawn. His smile is dark and her teeth shine in the firelight.

 

They are tireless.

 

* * *

 

_“I take this man.”_

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Writing this was really something different, it was the first thing I wrote in a new fandom after a whole ton of fics in another over the course of a few years. So maybe it was just the fact that it was sorta new but it was really kind of rewarding in a new way for me. 
> 
> This fandom is hands-down really kind, and if that doesn't seem like a huge deal, trust me it is, especially with the heavy kind of content included in this fic. Thanks for reading, thanks for the comments and kudos and bookmarks. You guys are awesome.
> 
> As for what's next I'll probably do a few prompts from livejournal's valar_morekinks comment-athon prompts (go check them out and add prompts, you never know what authors will end up writing). I have a Jon/Lyanna Mormont ten years later fic coming up and I'm going to finish my jon/sansa "The Fair Wrought House Has Fallen".


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